Irene Cheng, Associate Professor, Co-Director of History Theory Experiments and MAAD HTX

Irene is an architectural historian, critic, and educator. Her research explores the entanglements of architecture, culture, politics, and the environment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her recent book project, entitled The Shape of Utopia: The Architecture of Radical Reform in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Minnesota Press) explores the geometry of architectural projects affiliated with anarchist, socialist, abolitionist, free love, spiritualist, and other radical antebellum movements. She is also a co-director of the Race + Modern Architecture Project (R+MAP), an interdisciplinary research group that is exploring the influence of racial discourses on architecture from the Enlightenment to the recent past, and a co-editor of Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020).

James Graham, Assistant Professor, Co-Director of History Theory Experiments and MAAD HTX

James is a historian, architect, and assistant professor at the California College of the Arts. He is currently working on a book titled Psychotechnical Modernism: Architecture, Design, and Occupational Therapy, 1914–1945, which looks at the relationship of modernist design pedagogy to emerging ideas about vocation, ability, embodiment, and the organization of labor. James’s research and teaching interests also include the intersections of architecture with climatic imaginaries and environmental thought as well as the dynamics of extractive global modernity. He is a founding editor of the Avery Review, a digital journal of critical essays on architecture, and he both practices and writes about architecture’s discursive forms, whether as editorial platforms or experiments in digital and print publication.

Affiliated Faculty

MAAD HTX Students and Alumni

  • Leandra Burnett, 2020

  • Kurt Pelzer, 2019 (University of California, Los Angeles)

  • Shubalakshmi Shekar, 2018

  • Meghana Prabhune, 2017

  • Fangying Zhu, 2017

  • Sitou Akolly, 2016 (Architect and researcher, UN Studio, Amsterdam)

  • Kelsang Chandra, 2015 (University of California, Berkeley)

  • Joseph Becker, 2013 (Associate Curator of Architecture and Design, SFMOMA)

  • Yves Ghai Chamlou, 2010 (Director, Yves Ghai Chamlou Architects)